The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  The longer you muse over and ponder [Shakespeare’s works], the more you enjoy them, the more you feel that you’re in contact with something important—you do wonder, ‘Who was this person?’ And that would be just as true if a message appeared on the beach in a bottle, and you opened it up. Even if you had no access whatsoever to whomever launched that, you would, if only idly, think, ‘Who sent me this message?’—particularly if the message seemed actually addressed, in a strange way, to you.… This is not unique to Shakespeare. If Jane Austen reaches you, if Kafka reaches you—if you feel you’re in contact with something powerful that is speaking to you deeply and personally—it is an absolutely natural human response to want to know who sent you this message and what to do about that response.

  And so we yearn to know the “real Shakespeare”—while at the same time we learn to live with the biographical gaps. We have the most crucial elements of Shakespeare’s life, and from those elements—after much scholarly research—a portrait, albeit an imperfect one, emerges.

  * * *

  There is a reason why I paused to look at the challenges of piecing together the details of Shakespeare’s life. I want the reader to be conscious of just how tricky it is to separate the probable from the plausible in the world of Shakespeare; to judge how speculative is too speculative. Every discipline has its quacks: Biology has “intelligent design”; psychology has parapsychology and phrenology; medicine has homeopathy; geology has (or at least had) its flat-Earthers and (amazingly) hollow-Earthers. And though it doesn’t have a catchy name, physics has its “Einstein was wrong”ers. Isaac Asimov, one of the great science communicators of the last century, spoke of his “built-in doubter,” which he called on when confronted with controversial claims. The more radical the claim, the more skepticism was needed. Carl Sagan expressed a similar sentiment when he said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A theory that claimed to overthrow four hundred years of established physics, for example, would demand the highest possible level of skepticism. One must doubt, but one must doubt intelligently.

  Shakespeare studies has, of course, the anti-Stratfordians, “the Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare” crowd. But a theory doesn’t have to be off-the-deep-end crazy to warrant suspicion. Nor is the reverse the case: A claim need not have tangible, physical proof to be plausible or even probable—as with the supposition that Shakespeare, as a youngster, attended his local grammar school, or that he owned at least a few books, which the majority of scholars accept. I sometimes wish I had a “nonsense detector,” analogous to Asimov’s doubter, that could do the work for me: When someone mentions young William’s attendance at the grammar school, it would emit a pleasing hum; perhaps a green light would go on. The discussion turns to Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies, or his sexual orientation, and a yellow warning light might come on. A visit to Italy? The yellow light begins to flash, and a buzzer comes on. Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford? The light turns red, the buzzer gets louder, and smoke begins to stream out of the machine.… (Not as much fun as a time machine, to be sure, but still rather handy.)

  We don’t have such a device, so we must make do with our common sense, and the opinions of those scholars who have dedicated their careers to the study of Shakespeare and his work—exercising caution when the experts disagree with each other. In the chapters ahead, we’ll face a task even more difficult than working out where Shakespeare was or who he was with at some particular time. We want to know what he was thinking. More specifically, we want to know what—if anything—he thought about the scientific discoveries of the day; the so-called “new philosophy.” Along the way we will hear a variety of theories and opinions, some of them very plausible and some perhaps not-so-plausible. I hope by this point I have laid the groundwork to help the reader navigate through the coming arguments.

  If this were a traditional Shakespeare biography, we would plod through obligatory chapters on Elizabethan drama, the layout of the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s use of language, and so forth—but we must move on. As we’ve seen, the final decade of the sixteenth century was a remarkable time in English history. This was the age not only of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Kyd, but also the age of John Dee, Thomas Digges, and Thomas Harriot. Nobody could have known it at the time, but a new age—the Age of Science—was nascent. We are now ready to ask how much Shakespeare may have known about such developments. Did he ever meet any of the great scientific thinkers of the day? Did he hear about their work, or read about their ideas? And if he did, how did that knowledge shape his own work? We could begin with any one of the playwright’s beloved works, but why not start with the most famous of all. Let us head for the battlements of Elsinore.

  7. “More things in heaven and earth…”

  THE SCIENCE OF HAMLET

  More than four hundred years after its debut on the London stage, Hamlet remains Shakespeare’s most famous work, his most frequently produced play, and, arguably, his greatest artistic achievement. (A significant number of critics, especially since the early decades of the twentieth century, have voted for King Lear over Hamlet—we’ll look at that contest a bit more in Chapter 14—but for now, let’s not quibble; for the sake of argument, let’s say they’re both works of the highest order of literary genius.) Hamlet is also Shakespeare’s longest play—staged uncut, it would run for more than four hours—and one of the most problematic.* Incredibly, as the centuries pass, Hamlet seems more and more relevant: It is said to define what it means to be modern; to be self-aware; to be human. Prince Hamlet himself is Shakespeare’s most complex character, and certainly the most thoroughly scrutinized figure in English literature. (He also loves to talk, speaking more than 1,500 lines, accounting for about 39 percent of the play.) Hamlet is the role most coveted by actors, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his obvious flaws. He is cowardly, narcissistic, indecisive, starkly misogynistic—the list goes on—and yet we can’t seem to get enough of him. Perhaps, as William Hazlitt once put it, “It is we who are Hamlet.” For a fictitious character, the prince and his inner turmoil seem all too real. His speeches, Hazlitt reminds us, are “but idle coinages of the poet’s brain,” and yet “they are as real as our own thoughts.”

  While Hamlet is rarely examined from the point of view of science, it is impossible not to think of the play, at least in part, as a reflection of its turbulent times—a period of remarkable intellectual upheaval. The time, many people surely felt, was indeed “out of joint.” From the play’s start to its finish, Prince Hamlet seems trapped between two worlds. In act 1 we find him “crawling between earth and heaven” (1.2.129); when his uncle asks him about his dark mood, he claims to have been, on the contrary, “too much in the sun” (1.2.67). Several acts later, we find him peering down at Ophelia’s freshly dug grave while invoking the planets above; he notes that Laertes’ grief “conjures the wand’ring stars” (5.1.249). And lest we imagine the stars are moving across the sky peaceably, the ghost has warned Hamlet that his tale will “make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres” (1.5.17). The prince will soon be complaining that the world—“this goodly frame the earth”—is, for him, “a sterile promontory” (2.2.298–99).

  “YOND SAME STAR THAT’S WESTWARD FROM THE POLE”

  The action of the play is grounded in Denmark, but right from the opening scene we are asked to look upward. For the past two nights, the guards at Elsinore have been startled by the appearance of a ghost resembling the dead king (the recently deceased King Hamlet, father of the title character). Horatio, an old school friend of the prince, arrives on the scene, and Bernardo, one of the guards, explains the ghost’s habits: He is prone to walking about the ramparts at night—not just at any time of night, but at one hour past midnight, when a particular star appears “westward from the pole”:

  Last night of all,

  When yond same star that’s westward from the pole,

  Had made its course to illume that part of heaven

  Where now i
t burns, Marcellus and myself,

  The bell then beating one—

  Hamlet (1.1.39–42)

  Bernardo is struck silent at this point when (speak of the devil!) the ghost appears, as if on cue. Is Bernardo merely using this star as a way of marking the time? Perhaps—and, as we’ve seen, there are other occasions where Shakespeare’s characters track the time by noting the positions of the stars (see here). But in Hamlet, the stars (and celestial happenings in general) seem to hold more gravitas for Shakespeare’s characters than what we might associate with mere timekeeping. As Horatio explains, strange phenomena in the heavens are often accompanied by dire events on Earth. He refers to the murder of Julius Caesar, signaled by “stars with trains of fire”—a reference to meteors or a comet, perhaps—and “disasters in the sun”; the moon, meanwhile, was “sick almost to doomsday with eclipse” (1.1.120–23). And so the star “westward from the pole,” we might surmise, holds more significance than some run-of-the-mill star that one might use to mark the hour.

  But what star, exactly, are we talking about? Can we reconstruct the skies over Denmark at the time of Hamlet and find out?* Astronomer Donald Olson has attempted to do just that. Olson, who teaches at Southwest Texas State University, is sometimes described as a “forensic astronomer.” He and his students analyze astronomical references in art and literature, in an effort to gain a deeper insight into the works in question. Over the years, he’s tackled such diverse subjects as Julius Caesar’s account of his invasion of Britain, Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, and the photographs of Ansel Adams. In the 1990s, he turned his attention to Hamlet, and, in particular, to the star seen from the ramparts of Elsinore.† He begins with the clues present in the text itself: We know the time of night (1 a.m.), as well as the star’s location in the sky (“westward from the pole”)—but to know which star that might be, we also need to know the time of year. Fortunately, there are further clues. Francisco complains that the night is “bitter cold” (1.1.8), and Hamlet, on the following night, agrees that “the air bites shrewdly, it is very cold” (1.4.1). Olson argues, quite reasonably, that this is suggestive of late fall or winter. Another reference makes it clear that we are not currently in “that season … Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated” (1.1.163–64), implying that the scene is not unfolding during Advent; thus most of December is ruled out. But we also know that two months have passed since old Hamlet’s death—a murder, as it turns out—which happened while he was taking a nap outdoors, in his garden. Putting these clues together, Olson concludes that King Hamlet died in September, and that the ghost’s appearance on the battlements takes place in November. (So far, so good; a number of other scholars have also put forward November as the most probable time of the play’s initial action.)

  Now that we have the time of year as well as the time of night, what star might we find “westward from the pole”? Olson and his students used astronomical software* to try to answer that question, but as it turns out, there is no obvious candidate for such a star—at least, not at first glance. Olson considers, and then rejects, the various stars that make up Ursa Major and Ursa Minor (the Great Bear and the Little Bear); they aren’t in the right part of the sky at that time of year; neither are the bright stars Vega or Deneb, which lie at the right declination (that is, the right distance from the pole star) but which again would not lie to the west of the pole in late fall. About all that’s left, Olson argues, are the stars of Cassiopeia, which does happen to lie fairly close to the pole (in a direction roughly opposite to that of the “Big Dipper” asterism of Ursa Major). Unfortunately, Cassiopeia contains no particularly bright stars—none of the first magnitude*—and the second-magnitude stars that make up the familiar “W” (or “M”) are all of about equal brightness. If one were keeping time by noting the position of Cassiopeia, one might just as well refer to the constellation as a whole than to single out any one of its virtually identical stars.

  But as Olson points out—and as we saw in Chapter 3—there was a bright star in Cassiopeia, back in the days of Shakespeare’s youth. It was, of course, Tycho’s star, the supernova of 1572, which lit up the skies over Europe that fall, remaining visible for more than a year. It would have been in just the right part of the sky to lie “westward from the pole” at about 1 a.m. on a crisp November night, as seen from England or Denmark (or anywhere else of that approximate latitude). As we’ve seen, beginning with the Prologue, Shakespeare was just eight years old when Tycho’s star appeared. The Prologue is fiction, of course, but it seems reasonable to expect that young William would have remembered such a sight from his childhood. We can’t know how vivid the memory would have been more than twenty-five years later, when he sat down to write Hamlet, but I would suggest, as Olson does, that one’s first sighting of a bright new star—a star that’s not supposed to be there, which stays in the sky for months, and which people keep on talking about for years—is not something one would soon forget. Moreover, when Shakespeare was a young man, there would have been a reminder: As Olson points out, the historian Raphael Holinshed discusses the star at some length in his Chronicles—one of Shakespeare’s key sources for his history plays. (The Chronicles also gave Shakespeare the plot of Macbeth, and bits of King Lear and Cymbeline.) Published in 1577 and reprinted in 1587, the Chronicles refer to a new star “in the constellation of Cassiopeia … [appearing] bigger than Jupiter, and not much lesse than Venus when she seemeth greatest.” The star was “so strange, as from the beginning of the world never was the like.” I tend to agree with Olson, that Shakespeare’s “boyhood memory of the new star could have been reinforced [by Holinshed] at the time he was writing Hamlet.”

  Of course, Olson isn’t the first to ponder the nature of the star “westward from the pole,” but for some reason its identity has left Shakespeare scholars somewhat baffled. Many editions of Hamlet helpfully point out that “pole” means “pole star” (so far, so good) but leave it at that. Many also note that it is perfectly reasonable for the guards doing the night shift at Elsinore to mark the time by following the stars (even when clocks that strike the hour are present, as we are told they are in Shakespeare’s play).* In the Penguin edition (1980, reprinted 1996), T. J. B. Spencer writes that the playwright “throughout the scene gives an impression of a clear, frosty, starlit sky.” Fair enough. He adds, “Bernardo presumably points to the sky at one side of the stage, guiding the eyes of the audience away from where the ghost will enter,” reminding us that the reference to the star may be motivated more by utilitarian stagecraft than by astronomical accuracy. Spencer then points to some of the other words that Bernardo uses to describe the star and its motion: “made its course”; “illume”; “burns.” Taken together, Spencer says, this “seems to imply that the star is a planet” (italics in the original). Unfortunately, this cannot be: Planets are always located near the ecliptic—that is, near the imaginary line that runs through the constellations of the zodiac—and not near the pole.*

  “THESE BLESSED CANDLES OF THE NIGHT”

  It’s remarkable how much confusion Shakespeare’s astronomical references have wrought—with references to the pole star being (for some reason) among the most problematic. Bernardo’s speech on the ramparts is one of at least three references to the celestial pole—the spot marked, roughly, by the “pole star” or “northern star.” The most famous instance comes from the lips of Julius Caesar, who declares, “… I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament” (3.1.60–62). The star shines again in act 2 of Othello, where we find Montano, the Venetian governor of Cyprus, discussing the fate of a Turkish naval fleet caught in a violent storm at sea. Even watching from shore, they can discern the storm’s fury. Montano asks his companions what the fate of the Turkish fleet will be. One of them (identified only as “Second Gentleman”) replies,

  A segregation of the Turkish fleet:

  For do but stand upon the foaming shore,

 
; The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds,

  The wind-shaked surge, with high and monstrous mane

  Seems to cast water on the burning Bear

  And quench the guards of th’ever-fixèd pole.

  (Othello 2.1.10–17)

  In spite of the flowery language, the gist of the passage is clear enough: The storm is so bad it will surely be the demise of the Turkish ships. Owing to intense winds, the ocean spray has become so thick as to render the stars invisible—or, perhaps, the spray is rising so high that it seems to extinguish the stars. (Or, as George Costanza would have put it, “The sea was angry that day, my friends—like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.”) We might stumble on some of the particular words—like “chidden,” for starters. (Footnotes to the rescue: Apparently it means “repelled by the shore.”) Easier to gloss is the “burning Bear,” presumably a reference to either Ursa Major or Ursa Minor—and since the next line mentions the “guards” of the pole, we can surmise that we’re talking about the pole star and its neighbors: The guards are the two bright stars in the bowl of the Little Dipper, a part of Ursa Minor (the Little Bear), believed to guard or protect the north star.

  The phrase “ever-fixèd pole” seems straightforward, but, as with so many passages in Shakespeare, it suffers from textual ambiguity. The quarto (1622) and folio (1623) editions of the play differ in a number of places, and this is one of them: It is fired in the former but fixed in the latter. Were the folio editors simply correcting a typo in the quarto? If so, the line expresses the most familiar property of the north star, which remains fixed in the sky while the other stars appear to circle around it. If we instead read it as “fired,” then it presumably has something to do with “burning” in the previous line, and similar phrasings do crop up, occasionally, elsewhere in the canon. (The Arden edition goes with “ever-fired”; the Oxford, quoted above, goes with “ever-fixèd.”) At least everyone seems to agree on the significance of these particular stars: The scene describes the fate of warships on the high seas, so there is little surprise that it contains a reference to stars that were of particular interest to navigators. In fact, their utility is twofold: The direction of the pole star indicates north, while the orientation of the “guards” relative to the pole can be used to determine the hour.